So Funny It Hurts
Carl Kozlowski
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The real lives of comedians are often laced with tragedy that some do their best to hide from the public.

Like his peers, Christopher Titus has had more than his share of emotional hardships: a womanizing, alcoholic father and a mentally ill mother who eventually committed murder, attempted suicide and is now institutionalized.

But, unlike many of his peers, the Massachusetts native has made a living making some of his life’s most unpleasant memories part of a thriving, critically-acclaimed standup career that has included daring stage shows such as Norman Rockwell is Bleeding and the scorching sitcom Titus on Fox.

In fact, Titus, the former Fox sitcom featuring Titus and Stacy Keach as his alcoholic father, was a celebration of Titus’ own sometimes macabre and cynical, but more often hilarious, take on the dysfunctional relationship he had with his dad.

But the 38-year-old Titus wasn’t always so forthright about his past. Back in 1984, “I was making more than $1,000 a month (a lot of money in 1984), but I figured that’s a living…I had a completely different act then, joking about supermarkets and everyday stuff like that,” he recalled in an Arriviste interview.

“But I had a moment with my agent, who told me to talk for real about my life.  And I thought, wow, if he’s willing to sacrifice the decent money I was making him, it was worth it, and within 6 months I had a whole new set about my family,” he said.

“The first time I did a bit about my mom being in a mental hospital, I started tearing up on stage, but after 10 times it just became a piece of material.”

After his parents divorced, Titus lived with three stepmothers and what seemed like an endless stream of his father Ken’s live-in girlfriends.  Things got so bad with his dad that Titus hit the road by the time he was 12 to go and live with his mother.

Believing things would get better – his mom, Juanita, was a classical pianist and his dad was a salesman – he soon came to realize that his life had gone from bad to worse… much worse.

His mother plunged into mental illness and poverty and ending up living in a garage. During that time, she was committed to a series of mental institutions, eventually killing her second husband in 1986 after being released from one of those facilities.

But amazingly, Titus keeps hitting the stages of clubs around the country, exposing his wounds in the hope that airing them out will at last rid them and set him free. Now a happily married father  with a slew of TV and film projects in the works, Titus said he was ready to “burn Rockwell” once and for all by taping a performance of it at UCLA and keeping it for posterity via airings on Showtime and the lucrative world of DVDs.

“I’m never doing it again after I tape the show, so these shows we’re filming are the last chance people will have to ever see them up close in a club setting,” Titus explains. “I already have a new one-man show called The 5^th Annual End of the World Tour; it’s about my wife giving birth 16 days before September 11…

“I’m still a cynical guy, but I’m a father now and that makes you different -- now I’m thinking about the world we’re leaving my son [named Kenny in honor of Titus’ father], because he may have to be the real John Connor (of Terminator fame) and rise up to lead the resistance.”

Titus built his image on a mix of startling honesty and tough-as-nails fortitude. True to his macho image, he conducted this phone interview with A_P while testing out jackhammers at a Home Depot.

While that provided for an unusual mix of cell phone static and an incredible metallic racket, his voice carried through strongly -- just as it has since 1998, when the intensely personal Rockwell made such a positive impression in its short six-week run at LA’s Hudson Theatre.

But Titus’ take on life wasn’t confined to comedy club stages. Some of that material eventually led to 54 episodes of Titus, a show that depicted his sometimes-twisted relationships with his brother and hard-drinking father. Although the show pulled decent ratings for its first two seasons, a change in Fox executive leadership, and competing with then-ratings powerhouse The West Wing, caused the show being dumped.

“We told the truth and that scared the hell out of Fox, who wanted to make it much more ‘family-friendly.’ I said this is what real families are like, and the ratings showed it,” said Titus. .”But they said I was difficult because I wouldn’t do what they wanted to do.”

Although he is a father now, Titus said his next stage show, which he is producing for comedian Bill Dwyer, will be positive but will still be “plenty cynical.”

Just wait for the part of the show in which he pays tribute to his late father, whom he reconciled with as an adult and “became best friends with the last five years of his life.”

“My brother and I were spreading my dad’s ashes in the casino at Caesar’s Palace because he loved that place. We also had dropped some in a dressing room of a Victoria’s Secret,” Titus said with a chuckle.

“The Caesars folks didn’t let us do it, but we had read the casino’s charter of rules and there wasn’t a rule against it so we did it -- leaving a trail of smoke behind us. It was post-9-11, so people thought it was anthrax and were freaking out. Dad would have loved it.”

Carl Kozlowski is a regular Arriviste contributor and the co-author of the satirical self-help guide Life: The Final Frontier. (Pick this up!) He has also performed standup coast to coast and written for the Chicago Tribune, New City Weekly in Chicago, Chicago Reader and Pasadena Weekly.